King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
This article provides a pair of complementary reviews by two experts on the region. The opening is by Dr. Samii.
Scott Anderson has the formula for producing successful histories: writing with a journalist’s engaging style, building on scholars’ earlier works, and exploiting declassified government documents and other previously unavailable resources. He uses this approach for his Kings of Kings, a study of Iran’s Islamic Revolution that
doubles as an examination of United States-Iran relations.... The layperson could do much worse than reading Kings of Kings to understand the fall of the US-allied monarchy, a development that continues to affect US regional policy and developments elsewhere, according to Anderson. (xviii) The book details a US policy failure, as the White House became dependent on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from the late 1960s onward and policy formulation became paralyzed as the revolution loomed.